Valentyna Golovko, a compressor unit operator at the Process Water and Slurry Circuit Shop of Northern GOK, knows that everyone can help fight the aggressor in their own way, sometimes even without leaving home. Between shifts, she finds time to volunteer: for two winter seasons, she has been tirelessly knitting socks for the Ukrainian military.
There is a constant demand for handmade knitted high socks from local volunteers, as well as from relatives, neighbours and colleagues who have relatives in the trenches. That is why she does not stop working in the cold season. To date, she has knitted more than 90 pairs.
"I recorded the time: in seven hours, I have a pair of socks ready. They are long, without patterns and decorations – to make them quicker. I really want the soldiers to have warm feet. During the first winter of the war, I could not eat, sleep or calmly watch the video of our guys in the trenches in the middle of an empty field. Mud, cold, rain or snow, and they are fighting. I look at them and start knitting. After all, how else could I help them?”, Valentyna said. “And I put a talisman-note inside each pair of socks: "Dear defender, please come back alive!".”
Valentyna works at home and sends the socks she knitted to the military through volunteers she knows. She collects knitting threads from all her friends, buys something, brings something from her acquaintances. In addition to socks, she made custom-made warm belts and gloves. The volunteer does not have a "production" plan, but she says she will not stop working.
"No matter how hard it is now morally, we need to think positively, so I am knitting and waiting for the victory. I regret that I stopped working in the summer, when there was no demand for warm products. I had to make them in advance. But I believed so much that the war would end soon! Unfortunately, not... And now my volunteer friends keep asking me if I have any socks. So I will definitely finish my hundred pairs of socks, and then as many more as I can. I am happy that I can help the army in this way. The soldiers respond and ask for more, saying that if they have only one pair of boots and need to wash and dry them, they put on socks and move around in them. They even send me videos via volunteers," says the SevGOK employee.
Today, Valentyna Holovko's socks warm the soldiers on the frontline with their positive energy, which the craftswoman puts into each of her loops and knots.
